Identification of Parallel Passages Across a Large Hebrew/Aramaic Corpus

TL;DR

This paper introduces an efficient method for detecting parallel passages in large Hebrew/Aramaic texts, capable of handling variations and rephrasing, demonstrated on the Babylonian Talmud with rapid results.

Contribution

The authors present a novel approach that quickly identifies parallel passages in large corpora, improving efficiency over traditional exhaustive methods.

Findings

Identified over 4600 parallel passages in the Babylonian Talmud.

Method runs in just over 30 seconds on a 1.8 million-word corpus.

Coverage comparable to slow exhaustive search methods.

Abstract

We propose a method for efficiently finding all parallel passages in a large corpus, even if the passages are not quite identical due to rephrasing and orthographic variation. The key ideas are the representation of each word in the corpus by its two most infrequent letters, finding matched pairs of strings of four or five words that differ by at most one word and then identifying clusters of such matched pairs. Using this method, over 4600 parallel pairs of passages were identified in the Babylonian Talmud, a Hebrew-Aramaic corpus of over 1.8 million words, in just over 30 seconds. Empirical comparisons on sample data indicate that the coverage obtained by our method is essentially the same as that obtained using slow exhaustive methods.